Idaho has made it illegal to teach about slavery in schools and universities.

Idaho’s governor, Brad Little, has a bill signed into law that aims to restrict critical race theory from being taught as a subject in schools and universities.

We know there’s some dumb critical race theory out there, such as the Robin DiAngelo version for instance, but Idaho apparently interprets it very broadly.

The bill, H 377, prevents teachers from “indoctrinating” students into belief systems that claim that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups. Signed into law last week, H 377 also makes it illegal to make students “affirm, adopt or adhere to” beliefs that members of these groups are today responsible for past actions of the groups to which they claim to belong.

The issue isn’t that contemporary people are responsible for what people did in the distant past, it’s that some of us benefit from it while others continue to be profoundly ripped off by it.

Since the publication of The 1619 Project in the New York Times, a number of school districts and school boards across the US have begun to adopt elements of critical race theory in their curricula.

As a result, Republican state legislatures have begun to push back, sending bills through statehouses that attempt to quell the momentum of teaching slavery and other such moments of American history as dark periods of the country’s past that continue to affect American life today.

Because what, they were actually bright happy periods that don’t continue to affect American life today?

Here’s the thing: the former slaves were never compensated for the generations of stolen labor. That’s all you need to know, really. Reconstruction was defeated and after that the former slaves and their children and grandchildren and so on were treated all too much like slaves, except without the protection that an expensive investment usually gets. It’s just idiotic to try to pretend that slavery doesn’t “continue to affect American life today.”

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has recently spoken out against The 1619 Project specifically, as the Biden administration is considering $5.3m in American History and Civics Education grants for anti-racist scholarship.

In a letter to the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, McConnell wrote that families in the US. “did not ask for this divisive nonsense”, and that a decision to move forward was not made by voters.

“Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell wrote.

You know who’s inherently evil? Mitch McConnell.

H/t Studebaker Hoch

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Those drugs can’t possibly be legal.

I’ve been thinking more and more about this issue as though it’s a battle of stories. To some people, the Story of Trans absolutely must be a happy story, as uplifting and life-affirming as a lost-dog-reunited viral video. They genuinely think that being a good LGBT ally means simply making sure you fix in your mind a happy story about LGBT people whenever the topic arises.

Isn’t it incredible that there are two kinds of trans “allies”, two groups who actually hold completely opposing views about trans issues, but who remain united in their shared opposition to criticism of gender ideology, because they see anything with a critical tone as an unhappy story. It’s another reason why it feels so unreal being gender critical right now — we’re stuck in between these two contradictory groups all the time: you’ve got the friendly-but-unaware progressives who totally agree with you in principle about things like self-ID and mixed-sex sports and prisons, and children’s school indoctrination programs and draconian speech laws… but they absolutely disagree with you that any of it is happening in any significant way right now — because they have to disagree about that part, because otherwise they’d have to accept an unhappy story about trans into their hearts.

And then you’ve got the indoctrinated true believers, who are the polar opposite, who totally agree with you that all of it’s happening all over the place right now — they love it; for example all these kids getting “gender affirmed” by today’s medical “heroes”, it’s all so squee, like those lost little Labradors on YouTube, reunited with their people at last — but the true believers absolutely disagree with you that there’s anything about it that could possibly be bad or should raise any concerns, because otherwise it’s not a happy story but a potential tragedy.

These two groups’ positions are irreconcilable. There are lots of beliefs shared between each group individually and us — the friendly unawares share with us the belief that this stuff is bad; the zealous allies share with us the belief that this stuff is happening — but between each other their beliefs have exactly no common ground.

And yet, despite their total disagreement on the facts, they’re allied against us, high-fiving each other for simply holding their respective but incompatible happy stories in their hearts about trans in contrast to the supposed transphobia that we’re perpetuating by presenting facts and arguments which to them don’t sound very nice. It’s so stupid. I mean, if they themselves simply combined their beliefs they’d end up exactly in line with ours — those two happy stories when combined turn into a nightmare.

It reminds me of what Graham Linehan calls Festen moments, in reference to the Danish art film The Celebration, where a family patriarch’s 60th birthday gala is interrupted by his son who reveals that he was sexually abused by the tycoon, and all the guests turn against the son because they can’t allow the happy story of their family dynasty to be darkened. A truth that punctures a beloved story is like a heckler who threatens to spoil a good party.

I’m not so much interested in persuading the true believers anymore. They’ll have their reckoning later. But I hold out hope today for the friendly unawares. I want badly to get through to them, and maybe one way to do that is to show them that the real world is fundamentally not made up of stories. The real world is material; it’s made of a jumble of stuff. So I’d say an accurate way to think of social progress is something like, we’re looking at a bunch of people and things that interact in a big mess of contradictory motives and circumstances and variables and chaos, and our job is to look at facts and balance needs and principles and find ways to reduce harm and increase human rights and justice and wellbeing as best we can wherever possible. It’s messy and it sometimes involves looking and thinking hard at all that messy stuff.

It’s far less accurate to interpret social progress the storybook way: as looking at a bunch of comparatively simple conflicts between forces of good and forces of bad in the world where your job is just to make sure you always find your way to the side of the good guys at the end of each chapter.

I guess what I’m saying is, stop trying to see reality as a story where you can edit out the bad parts and polish up the good parts until, to you at least, it looks the way you like it and it just tells you exactly what you already wanted to hear anyway. We can’t ignore the messy stuff of reality, because it’s the material world, not the stories we tell ourselves and each other about it, that we all have to live in. And we have to find a way to live in it together.

So creepy Gegi is a lawyer now?

What does that mean? Is it a human rights violation to say that a skirt doesn’t turn a man into a woman?

What if teachers have too many other things to do to “practice articulating that one of our legal responsibilities is mitigating gender-based discrimination in our classroom and school”? And why do they need to “practice articulating” it anyway? Is there going to be a contest?

The trumpist takeover proceeds.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is poised this week to become the highest ranking elected Republican woman in the House of Representatives, as the beneficiary of the GOP mutiny against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). Cheney, the chair of the House Republican conference, dared to acknowledge reality: Donald Trump lost the election and then incited the seditious attack on the US Capitol. For that sin, the House Republican wing of the Trump cult will give Cheney the boot and replace her with Stefanik, who is in her fourth term representing a district in upstate New York.

Remember when the Republicans were the law and order party? It still seems odd that now they’re the insurrection party.

Stefanik’s Trumpification stands out because only a few years ago—well into Trump’s presidency—she was speaking critically about him on key fronts. In fact, at times Stefanik sounded practically like a Never Trumper, as she called on Trump to recognize that Russia had attacked the 2016 election to help him, urged him to release his tax returns, and assailed him for his comments about women. 

What happens to people, that they can make that switch?

When the Access Hollywood video of Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women became public during the 2016 race, Stefanik criticized Trump, saying, “Donald Trump’s inappropriate, offensive comments are just wrong—no matter when he said them or whatever the context. I hope his apology is sincere.” But she wouldn’t break with him. 

Two years later, she criticized Trump for his pattern of offensive remarks about women. When Trump in an October 16, 2018, tweet referred to Stormy Daniels—the porn star who he paid hush money to keep quiet regarding the allegation they once had an extramarital affair—as “Horseface,” Stefanik took exception. She told CBS News, “I think it’s unacceptable.” And she went further: “I’ve disagreed with the President’s rhetoric numerous times when it comes to how he addresses women.” 

But then [something something something] so all is changed.

The GOP mutiny against Cheney shows the party cannot escape Trump’s Stalinist grip on it. And Stefanik, who once claimed a measure of independence, has happily become the poster child for its accelerating descent into soul-crushing cultism.

And all for…Trump?

It’s all part of growing up…

The man never enters the frame, but we can tell he is older, and he must be much bigger than she is: the girl, still seated, cranes her face to look up at him. The calm confidence behind her large glasses snuffs out; her shoulders tense up, rising toward her ears….“I see your hesitancy,” he says…“I’m just doing a live and talking to some people,” she says, and glances towards her phone. That’s when he finally leaves her alone: not when he notices that she’s uncomfortable, but when he realizes that he is being watched.

The video (in two parts), posted to TikTok by the teenage user @maassassin_, immediately goes viral. Women, young and old, saw in the exchange a microcosm of their own experiences of being young girls, and of being approached, harassed, groomed or merely leered at by older men in ways that scared them at the time, and which they only later learned to put into context. The video blasted into the public consciousness on the heels of two high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by adult men towards teenage girls: first that of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who allegedly paid a 17-year-old for sex, and second that of Blake Bailey, the Philip Roth biographer who is accused of paying untoward attention towards his middle school students, and of sexually assaulting some of those students, as well as another woman, after they became adults. Gaetz and Bailey both deny wrongdoing.

It’s easy to “deny wrongdoing” if you don’t believe your doings were wrong, and it’s clearly way too easy for way too many men to think they have every right to predate on girls and women.

The incidents have prompted a miniature reckoning, with women reflecting on how much of their teenage years were spent navigating the sexual attentions of men many years their senior – and what it means when teenage girls’ experiences of male mentorship, early romance, and their own emerging adulthood is filtered so heavily through the lens of male desire and power imbalance.

And also of just plain creepiness. Of men in movie theaters, on subways, on park benches – being creepy. What does it mean that teenage girls’ experiences are filtered through that? It doesn’t seem altogether cheerful.

Those early experiences of male sexual aggression are maybe one of the most reliable rites of passage for female children. It’s more common than any of the other rituals that signal impending adulthood, more universal than the bat mitzvahs, or quinceañeras, or sweet 16 parties, or proms. By the time a girl reaches any of these milestones, she has likely already developed a skill set for navigating the unwanted attention of adult men…

Or maybe not so much a skill set as just an aversion. Just a fuck off go away leave me alone. I don’t remember it as anything to do with “navigating,” frankly, but rather as rage-fueled avoidance. That’s not a particularly good thing either.

The message that all of this sends to young girls is that womanhood is a state that consists largely of receiving unsolicited male attention, much of it benign but much of it threatening, exploitative or hostile, and that their ownership over their own bodies, their ability to peacefully occupy public space…can all be abridged by the whims of a man’s desire.

Can and will. Count on it.

Confirmation that we saw what we thought we saw – that what we saw is what we thought it was.

Allison Bailey says a thing, and guess who comes along to say “Nuh-uh.”

The trouble with that is, Robin Moira White is opposing counsel in Allison’s case against Stonewall. White should not be messing with Allison on social media.

It’s as if the normal rules just don’t apply.

It’s so bad that people don’t even believe it when you tell them.

And people don’t believe it’s happening, and people who warn that it’s happening get silenced and punished.

In cheerier news – Randy Rainbow has outdone himself.

Happy…Confederate Memorial Day?

South Carolina state government offices are closed Monday to mark Confederate Memorial Day.

Really. State government is on holiday to commemorate treason in defense of slavery. Cool that it’s the same state that is denying its citizens federal unemployment benefits because the state wants to force them to work in hotels and restaurants for shit pay in shit conditions…which is not as unlike slavery as it might be. It likely affects the same category of people, too.

South Carolina is among a handful of states in the South with such an official holiday. State offices in Alabama and Mississippi closed for their Confederate Memorial Days late last month.

Aka the Deep South aka the cotton belt.

Now let’s talk about girls and shared public spaces.

It’s all the same shit. Those girls jostled and blocked and spat on and kicked and knocked onto the track are the same category of human that was locked up in Magdalen laundries and imprisoned in industrial “schools” that were slave labor camps not schools, and now they’re fodder for adults preening over their infinite supply of solidarity with…boys who say they are girls.

I’ve watched this clip multiple times since yesterday – there’s a lot going on and it’s not possible to take in all of it in one viewing.

One boy kicks a girl as she runs past, one spits on a girl as she runs past, they all spread out over the platform so that they’re in the way of anyone who is trying to get on the train.

Cis female privilege in action yeah?

Catherine Belton, Nick Cohen tells us, has written a book about Russian plutocrats and their ways, and they are flocking to London courts to sue her into oblivion.

The former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times now faces a pile-on from Russian billionaires on a scale this country has never witnessed. Rosneft, the Kremlin-dominated oil producer (market capitalisation circa $75bn) whose chief executive, president and chairman, Igor Sechin, began his rise to power as Vladimir Putin’s secretary in the 1990s, has lodged an action for libel. No further details were available at the court at the time of going to press.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea football boss (estimated net worth $15.3bn) is suing because of what he says are “false and defamatory” statements about his purchase of Chelsea FC. Mikhail Fridman, owner of Russia’s largest non-state bank (net worth about $15.6bn) is suing for libel. Fridman’s business partner, Pyotr Aven, (net worth a paltry $5.3bn) is suing for breach of data protection. Aven and Fridman told the Financial Times they “had no contact with, and did not co-ordinate a legal strategy with, the other plaintiffs or their lawyers’’. Finally, there is a legal action by Shalva Chigirinsky, a former property tycoon (net worth unknown) with no details on record.

That’s a lot of billionaires suing.

Last week, Raab promised to fight “with the staunchest resolve” Russia’s “malign activities aimed at undermining other countries’ democratic systems”. If the foreign secretary is serious, perhaps he should take a look at London’s high-class service sector for the super-rich. He is unlikely to be able to rely on the legal profession to ask the hard moral and political questions for him.

I learned that in 2013 when I sat through a libel case arising from the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a foul Moscow prison. He worked for the Hermitage Capital fund and died suffering from horrible illnesses after he showed how former Russian officials and gangsters (a distinction without a difference if ever there was one) stole about $230m from the Russian taxpayer. His friend and boss at Hermitage, Bill Browder, began a successful global campaign to freeze the western holdings of corrupt Russians.

One official, Pavel Karpov, sued Browder for libel in London. Browder won, but Karpov stayed in Moscow and refused to pay Browder’s costs of £600,000. In other words, Russia, an actively hostile foreign power, appeared able to use the English legal system to impose the punishment of a huge fine on one of its most effective critics.

Slapp suits much?

[T]he EU is under pressure to act against what Americans call strategic lawsuits against public participation. Slapp actions grant access to the courts to powerful individuals or organisations that are less interested in actual verdicts than the prospect of extraordinarily expensive legal costs browbeating critics. My friends at Index on Censorship tell me that Britain has shown no interest in following suit.

Jobs for the barristers is it?

But have we been paying enough attention to the nons? People who aren’t a thing are people too you know! The BBC helps out by paying deep solemn reverent attention to those thrilling misunderstood long-neglected insufficiently advertised people the Aze.

In the UK, our awareness of asexuality – the experience of not feeling sexual attraction towards others – is still low.

Well it would be, wouldn’t it. It’s not generally something we need to know about other people, nor is it generally something other people need to know about us. Not feeling X towards other people is mostly just a personal [whatever] and thus not of general interest.

I really can’t stress enough how important it is to grasp that our personal tastes or habits or quirks or indifferences are not of general interest. They’re not the kind of thing you can build a politics around, even an identity politics, and they’re not the kind of thing you can build a news story around, either. They don’t make a “community.”

A poll of over 1,000 UK adults in 2019 suggests that three-quarters of them were incapable of correctly defining asexuality.

And that doesn’t matter, because there’s not really anything to define. Lack of interest in sex is just that.

So what is asexuality?

It’s a spectrum of experiences and identities. Some asexuals don’t experience romantic feelings, but others do.

What is the BBC doing publishing this teenagery nonsense? Nobody cares.

We get a whole tedious list of definitions, as if we were leaving for Camp Wokamonga tomorrow and needed to know what to pack.

￭ Gray-sexual: Someone who identifies with the area between asexuality and sexuality.

Oh shut up.

For the AVEN [the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network] though, it is clear that the number of people identifying with the term worldwide has been growing. “The most noticeable thing is that new communities are emerging all the time,” says Michael Doré, their spokesperson.

Because people like you babble about this horseshit and because adult institutions like the BBC for some reason publish your babbling. It’s not because there’s anything there.

“Today, the online ace community is represented on social media, Facebook and Discord. There are organisations in many different countries around the world, including outside the Anglosphere. Year on year, we’ve had a steady increase of members joining AVEN.”

Then we get three people’s self-admiring accounts of themselves, which I didn’t read because I want to continue to have the will to live.

A senior Sun reporter has died and tributes are pouring in.

There’s just this one tiny thing they’re forgetting to mention.

He murdered his wife.

Sharron Davies isn’t fooled.

Sharron Davies has hit out at [criticized] the decision to allow transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the Olympics, describing it as ‘another kick in the teeth for female athletes’.

Parenthetically: I hate that UK metaphor of “hitting out at” for criticizing, and I think journalistic outlets should never use it, seeing as how it thoroughly poisons the well.

‘Sport is for all but it must be fair,’ said Davies, who won a silver medal in the 400 metres medley at the 1980 Moscow Games. ‘I am pro everyone doing sport but I feel sex, not self-identified gender, should be how we compete.’

And that’s not just a feeling, it’s a thought based on facts – obvious facts.

‘I speak out because of personal experience of the East German doping programme when illegally-added male levels of testosterone cheated women out of success for years, unstopped by the International Olympic Committee or any other sporting bodies. It was a shameful period.

‘We were as aware then as we are now that it was not fair, cheating hundreds of people [specifically, women] out of their rightful medals and rewards. It can’t happen again to even one female.

‘Women’s sport has made such strides and we still don’t have equality with airtime, coverage, sponsorship, awareness or prize money. But this is another kick in the teeth for female athletes. Sadly, I think people will only see how unfair this is when it happens in front of their eyes.

‘Some young females will lose medals, places and success before we do something about the obvious, which is males are stronger and faster. It is a biological reality every single Olympic event shows.’

But, who cares, it’s only women. The IOC certainly doesn’t care.

Davies, two-time Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, former marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe and 60 other top-class athletes wrote to IOC president Thomas Bach expressing concerns in 2019 but did not receive a response.

Yeah, what do they know. Stupid bitches.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee said: ‘The team has a strong culture of inclusion and respect for all. We look forward to supporting all our athletes selected in Tokyo.’

That’s just meaningless pufflegab. They’re not “supporting” their female athletes by doing this.

Several female athletes share the view of Davies but are told to stay silent by sponsors to avoid controversy and a potentially toxic fall-out with the trans community.

Tracey Lambrechs, who competed for New Zealand in weightlifting at Rio 2016, said: ‘I’ve had female weightlifters come up to me and say, “What do we do? This isn’t fair”. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do because every time we voice it we get told to be quiet. We’re all about equality for women in sport but right now that equality is being taken away from us.’

Oh just shut up about it, you’re only women.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of British campaign group Fair Play For Women, said: ‘Female sports category exists so women have the chance to win. Here’s a person who was never internationally successful as a man, who can come into women’s competition and be an Olympic contender at 43. If you’re wondering if transwomen retain their male advantage, here’s your proof.’

But it’s trans-cheating so it’s virtuous and noble.

The Times reports that employers punish employees who fail to parrot the dogma about trans people, which means that employers are punishing their employees for failing to tell stupid lies. That’s not a fair or reasonable setup.

Dozens of women have faced disciplinary action at work for offences such as saying JK Rowling is not transphobic, asking a question during equality training or requesting female-only lavatories, according to 40 campaigners on free speech.

In a letter to The Sunday Times, the campaigners say that the employers of a quarter of UK workers have signed up to a Diversity Champions scheme run by the LGBT charity Stonewall. It means if people question what the campaigners refer to as “Stonewall law” — that “trans women are women; trans men are men” — they risk punishment.

Has this ever been the case when it’s a matter of hostile or contemptuous remarks to or about women?

The rise and fall (or fall and rise? or rise and fall and rise?) of an “influencer.”

Like cult-leaders, Instagram influencers must navigate a complex symbiosis with their followers to remain popular. Unlike cult-leaders, their lives are often funded by a commercial system of sponsored posts, a practice which Caroline abstains from. Instead, in March, as the world shut down, she started making money from selling topless photos on the platform ‘Only-Fans’.

So, photos with the tops cut off so that you get trees lopped in half or people whose faces stop at their nostrils? Doesn’t sound all that lucrative.

I tell her the way she uses Instagram reminds me of how Sylvia Plath wrote poems: art as an act of confession.

Or attention-seeking, or both.

But Calloway wants to chronicle her life more traditionally too. Her book, called Scammer, will come out next year – if she finishes it. I tell her (she is the kind of person you want to confess everything to) that I want to write about myself, but I feel like a narcissist when I try to. She tuts, “that’s so sad!” Does she ever feel the same? “No, no, no! I think British people see memoir as something so fundamentally guilt inducing, it’s something you should be shamed for, it’s just so fucking English, it’s so fucked up!”

She insists that the English “see a woman who wants to write about herself and the first word that slaps their frontal cortex is narcissism.” I’ve proven her point for her. But the accusation is thrown at Instagram Influencers as much as writers. The act of sharing yourself is easily perceived as obsessing over yourself.

Caroline thinks it’s different in the US. “Something America has that Britain doesn’t is a tradition of white male memoirists. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, Nabokov…with Speak Memory, George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London. All these famous American men left this long legacy for American women to pick up and hoist on their backs that I don’t think exists in England. But I think,” she hesitates, deliberating “I always think your own story is worth telling.”

Heeheeheehee.

They’re bound to fix it eventually, so I’d better do a screenshot just for safety.

Your instructions:

In other words it’s about women. Women are women. It saves a lot of trouble. Women who call themselves “trans men” or “nonbinary” are still women. Intersex women are women. The word “women” is all that’s required, and trying to delete it from the language is not a good idea, given the subordinate status women have had imposed on us.

You mean women planning “to hand a baby off” – which itself is a description that should get more careful thought than how to justify deleting the words “women” and “mother” from the language.

No. I’ll go on calling women “women,” thanks, and you don’t get to tell any of us not to.

For a few minutes there most Republicans in Congress accepted that the insurrection wasn’t the best idea ever. They’re back to normal now though.

Odds are that the erstwhile Republican party comrades of Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming will soon vote to purge her from the ranks of their leadership. Cheney, who occupies the third-highest position in the House Republican Conference and is the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, survived a similar removal effort in early February, after she was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former president Donald Trump. At the time, House Republicans decided to retain Cheney as conference chair by a 145-61 margin, while the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters that “Liz has a right to vote her conscience.”

But that was three months ago, when even Republican leaders like McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell acknowledged that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” (in McConnell’s words) for provoking the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January in an attempt to overturn the election. 

Three months = plenty of time to decide that it’s better to stick with Trump and his lies about the election, because [???].

Since then, however, the Republican base has continued to uphold Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him and have pushed to remove any party officeholders who say otherwise. A recent CNN poll confirmed that 70% of Republicans say Biden did not win enough votes to be president and half believe (without evidence) that solid proof of Trump’s victory exists.

So congressional Republicans, always reluctant to stand up against Trump and his supporters, are edging toward the view that Cheney must go. Her crime, as they see it, is that unlike McConnell and McCarthy she did not fall silent about Trump in the aftermath of impeachment and publicly declared that she would not support him if he were to run for the presidency again in 2024. As Trump has howled for Cheney’s political demise, internal Republican criticism of her has mounted.

In short, the Republicans are determined to be worse and stay worse. Interesting choice.